My Morning in Exile

Signs you blog too much: you get angrier at a sluggish Internet connection than you would at, say, a punch in the face or an insult of your mother or something. “I only have SEVEN Firefox windows open!!! Why won’t this page load faster!!!”

Because Clemens tried to defend himself against the claims of Mcnamee that makes him stupid according to this clown Calcaterra? What a dumb article written by a complete idiot and this isnt the first one he’s written thats been this bad either. I ask the writer of this BS, how would you like him to defend himself? Mcnamee should be responsible for what he said and should not get any kind of protection by the feds, yet more proof the legal system is a joke.

If you think I simply took the high road and let that stuff pass, well, you’re simply not familiar with my work.

Comments

Craig, you finally have addressed the Clemens farce, I’m so thrilled!!!

Wait a second….

….False alarm. Stupid defamation suit crap….

——-

(1) You’ve ragged on Rusty Hardin before. It seems to me that, unlike many clients who are meek and wholly deferential to their attorney’s “expertise”, Clemens is very probably just going against his attorney’s advice. After all, all that Hardin can do is advise him, right? Do you really believe that Hardin advised him to speak before Congress? To call ESPN Radio when the matter was all-but-forgotten by the public?

So do you have inside information that Hardin is actually telling Clemens to behave as he has? I’m strongly guessing that it’s merely Clemens’s own ego and lust for the limelight which has been the driving force here, not his counsel.

(2) If the judge ruled that Clemens could not sue McNamee because he was immune from defamation (somehow), couldn’t Clemens then simply alter the lawsuit to something akin to filing a false police report? (That is, if I were to tell the police that you punched me and they then go and investigate you and it turns out security cameras prove I was lying. You’d have some grounds for a lawsuit, correct?)

(3) Craig won’t address this everybody, so I will. Here’s the scoop: the federal government, which has spent between $40m and $100m persecuting – you read that right “persecuting” – Barry Bonds for an absolutely WORTHLESS case that would never, under any circumstances have resulted in a guilty verdict (save for a scenario where the jury was comprised of 12 impotent Rush Limbaughs jealous of black men’s virility) is not going to prosecute Clemens.

So:

Clemens’s cut-and-dry perjury to Congress =
No prosecution

Bonds’s kinda/sorta/maybe/I-guess/I-guess-not perjury to a grand jury about an unrelated matter=
massive prosecution wherein the government literally puts guns to the head of Bonds’s friend’s mother and wife.

Gee, I wonder why that could be?

In all seriousness, I cannot recommend researching the Bonds fiasco enough for entertainment and educational value. The case – from the very start to its current limping toward a dismissal – has been such an eye-opening spectacle of government power, militarism, and – yes, I’ll say it, begrudgingly – racism that it’s more heart-wrenching and interesting than anything on the CSIs and Law & Orders.

Every single reporter who’s followed the case – from the San Francisco Chronicle to Yahoo and everywhere in between (except, of course, ESPN, which loves the government the way William H. Macy loved the bartender in ‘Magnolia’) – has expressed incredulity, outrage, and utter confusion. The case was a joke. And it’s cost us the taxpayers tens of millions of dollars and countless man hours where cops and attorneys were senselessly trying to throw a black man in a cage over nothing. (All this in lieu of having the bureaucrats investigating, say, the millions of unsolved murders in America or the poisoning of a water table or anything that could possibly serve the public interest.)

So the next time you want to take a stroll along Bonds Bashin’ Lane, know that that poor man has lived the past two years exhausting his financial savings and having his sense of shelf pulverized by a savage, violent government that attacked him for no better reason than because he’s of African heritage. (This is evidenced by the non-prosecution of Clemens for real perjury and, indeed, Giambi, who reportedly gave the exact same testimony as did Bonds.)

David—While I acknowledge that you’ve been imploring me to write about the Clemens/perjury thing, my reluctance to do so isn’t based on an actual disagreement with you as much as it is based on the fact that, technically and literally speaking, the jury is still out as to whether there will be a prosecution (that you assume is not going to happen). The grand jury I mean. And I while I’ll grant that the longer the jury goes without returning an indictment, the less likely it is that one will never come, I don’t think it’s (yet) accurate to say that a prosecution is not forthcoming.

More generally, though, I agree with you that Barry Bonds has been subjected to way too much crap based on the record in that case. I think the government should have dropped that prosecution some time ago, actually. I don’t think the remedy to that, however, is to mount another prosecution in the interests of fairness. I want the government completely out of the steroid policing business.

I thank you for not reflexively playing a contrarian on the Bonds matter, and I can understand your holding judgment on the Clemens matter (although I think that it might be appropriate to set some arbitrary deadline for the feds).

And I agree with you 100% that the government has no business sticking its fat, violent face into the pro sports business….

….But when a man perjures himself before Congress – no matter how silly the reason he was summoned there in the first place – he must be prosecuted. “Just think of all the children who were watching!!!”

Seriously, though, Clemens’s flagrant perjury absolutely demands a prosecution. If that’s not a prosecutable incident of perjury, then there is no such thing as perjury.

Yes, every single one of those grandstanding Congressman – and even Harry Waxman for allowing the hearing – deserve to lose the support of their constituents as well as their fat pensions for wasting public time and dollars on such a worhtless matter as “steroids” in baseball. But the hearing did occur. Clemens swore the oath, and he then told bald-faced lies that were relevant to the hearing. That’s perjury, and it must be punished.

David, Giambi and Bonds hardly gave identical testimony. Giambi fessed up and admitted to doing it (in court, that is). Bonds tried to wiggle around with whether or not he knew what he was taking. Look, I agree they never should have been testifying, and I agree the government’s prosecution of Bonds is a miscarriage of justice, but by not playing games, Giambi didn’t even give the government a chance to toy with the notion of prosecuting him for perjury.

I’ve found the article I mentioned earlier regarding Giambi’s testimony. Giambi stated the specific drugs which he used, but evasively described them as an “alternative to steroids”. (But that might not’ve been evasive; again, these drugs were NOT classified as steroids at that time!)

“Giambi testified that Anderson told him the designer drug also allegedly used by Bonds known as the Clear was “an alternative to steroids” that would not show up on a drug test. Giambi added that he had not seen any proof that the Clear made him stronger.

“I mean, there wasn’t anything miracle about it,” he told the grand jury.”

And here’s a quote from reporter Jon Littman regarding Benito Santiago and Giambi’s similar testimony:

“As with Bonds, Santiago rebuffed repeated attempts by Nedrow to establish that he knew what substances he was taking. His testimony mirrored that of Jason Giambi, whose statements to the grand jury were revealed in a Feb. 3 Yahoo! Sports story. Giambi repeatedly said Anderson did not tell him what the Clear and the Cream were. Five times during his testimony he referred to the Clear as an “alternative to steroids.”

Santiago, like Giambi, asserted that the substances didn’t work. He also testified that he didn’t always follow Anderson’s alleged doping calendars.”

I hate to keep recycling my outrage, but I’ve gone on a mini-bender here in the past two hours re-reading about the whole nightmarish debacle. In article after article, fact after fact, and column after column, one theme becomes overwhelmingly clear: These government agents are the most pathetic, whiny, slimy, effeminate “men” imaginable. And their case is as sloppy as they are. What an absolute disgrace to the notion that the legal system seeks to mete out justice. What a disgrace. What a waste of taxpayer dollars and government manpower (not that they’re lacking that.)

So, although it’s hardly the most vital element of the racist, anti-Bonds case, I’d say that the issue of selective prosecution has merit and, if the prosecution ever needed it, would be worth pursuing.

Last winter, a news agency – I’m pretty sure it was Yahoo – posted quotes (possibly even transcripts) of grand jury testimony, including Bonds, Benito Santiago, Jason Giambi, and I believe a few others.

Side by side, there was almost no difference between anybody in their testimony. They all played dumb (who knows….maybe it wasn’t even playing; the drugs that they were taking were not even classified as steroids by the government at that time, so if the government didn’t classify them as steroids, why the hell would the ballplayers on the stand?) and used very similar words. Their testimony was all so similar that you’d guess that they were all coached by the same person.

But the issue of possible selective prosecution is kind of a red herring, anyway, and perhaps I shouldn’t have brought it up. The fact of the matter is is that Bonds’s testimony about whether he knew if what Greg Anderson was giving him had absolutely zero effect on the BALCO case (the first criteria for perjury), one could never possibly say beyond a reasonable doubt that he was knowingly lying (the second criteria for perjury), and there is not a single sane human being who would argue that prosecutors could reasonably expect a guilty verdict (which is why they frantically pumped as much as $100m into the case; it was basically carpet-bombing). Hence, charges should never have been filed, but then, after they idiotically were filed, they should have at least dropped them when they saw that Bonds was going to fight back and not plea down.

And I’m not simply talking about legal machinations here, I’m talking about clear issues of justice, of right and wrong. Anybody who’s suffered beneath the wrath of the government – be it an IRS investigation, a DUI charge, marijuana charges, CPS, whatever – knows that they wield truly awesome power (which, of course, only increases by the day) and that that power should be tempered by at least a modicum of sanity. The Bonds case is a clear instance where a bunch of power-tripping racists took the axe of the government and just swung it maliciously at a black man that they just decided they didn’t like.

(I just looked for the article about the testimony of other players in the case – I’m 75% sure it was at Yahoo – but apparently Yahoo’s archives don’t go back that far.)

Way back in early 2006 – back when Bonds was still glowing from MVP awards and the praises of sabermetricians everywhere – the ‘San Francisco Chronicle’ wrote an article about why perjury in general – and the charges against Bonds, especially – were very hard to prosecute.

A few highlights:“You usually don’t have a confession saying, ‘I lied,’ ” Little said. If someone charged with lying about steroid use “thought it was human growth hormone, or a magic elixir, or if he didn’t know what it was, that’s not enough. … There’s no duty to inquire.”….He said the Supreme Court has ruled that an answer that is literally true, although intended to mislead, can’t be perjury. “The court said the prosecutor’s job is to ask exactly the right questions,’’ Little said.

”“If he was using phrases like, ‘I believe,’ or, ‘to the best of my memory,’ then you don’t have a perjury prosecution,’’ she said. “You may not have a model citizen, but you don’t have a perjury prosecution.’”

“People fudge the truth all the time. Perjury is the big lie, the lie that has an impact on the investigation, on victims,’’ Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor and a law professor at Loyola University in Los Angeles, said Friday. [NOTE: Bonds’s statements had absolutely no effect on the BALCO case whatsoever.]

That was written over three years ago; it seems prophetic today. Little could we possibly imagine the the government would be saying “F—- that. We want this black man in a cage so badly that we’re going to piss on the Constitution, assault women and old ladies, nearly bankrupt a prominent athlete, and imprison a man who we promised not to imprison to overcome the crappiness of our case. Oh yeah, and after a judge issues a sound ruling which ends our case, we’re still going to continue to waste the court’s time and millions more taxpayer dollars with an appeal that everybody knows is as flat as the charges themselves.”

What absolute animals. If these prosecutors were to have a heart attack and die from their Viagra….would the world be any poorer? Do they contribute anything useful to civilization? No, they’re racist, welfare queen leeches.